War Talk

Summer Games With
Nuclear Bombs

by Arundhati
Roy

June 1, 2002

When
India and Pakistan conducted their nuclear tests in 1998, even those of us who
condemned them, balked at the hypocrisy of Western nuclear powers. Implicit in
their denunciation of the tests was the notion that Blacks cannot be trusted
with the Bomb. Now we are presented with the spectacle of our governments
competing to confirm that belief.

As diplomats’
families and tourists disappear from the subcontinent, western journalists
arrive in Delhi in droves. Many call me. “Why haven’t you left the city?” they
ask. “Isn’t nuclear war a real possibility? Isn’t Delhi a prime target?”

If nuclear
weapons exist, then nuclear war is a real possibility. And Delhi is a prime target.
It is.

But where
shall we go? Is it possible to go out and buy another life because this one’s
not panning out?

If I go away,
and everything and everyone — every friend, every tree, every home, every dog,
squirrel and bird that I have known and loved — is incinerated, how shall I
live on? Who shall I love? And who will love me back? Which society will
welcome me and allow me to be the hooligan that I am here, at home?

So we’re all
staying. We huddle together. We realize how much we love each other. And we
think, what a shame it would be to die now. Life’s normal only because the
macabre has become normal. While we wait for rain, for football, for justice,
the old generals and eager boy-anchors on TV talk of first strike and
second–strike capabilities as though they’re discussing a family board game.

My friends and
I discuss Prophecy, the documentary about the bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The fireball. The dead bodies choking the river. The living stripped
of skin and hair. The singed, bald children, still alive, their clothes burned
into their bodies. The thick, black, toxic water. The scorched, burning air.
The cancers, implanted genetically, a malignant letter to the unborn. We
remember especially the man who just melted into the steps of a building. We
imagine ourselves like that. As stains on staircases. I imagine future
generations of hushed schoolchildren pointing at my stain…that was a writer.
Not She or He. That.

I’m sorry if
my thoughts are stray and disconnected, not always worthy. Often ridiculous.

I think of a
little mixed-breed dog I know. Each of his toes is a different color. Will he
become a radioactive stain on a staircase too? My husband’s writing a book on
trees. He has a section on how figs are pollinated. Each fig only by its own
specialized fig wasp. There are nearly a thousand different species of fig
wasps, each a precise, exquisite, synchrony, the product of millions of years
of evolution. All the fig wasps will be nuked. Zzzz. Ash. And my husband. And
his book.

A dear friend,
who’s an activist in the anti-dam movement in the Narmada valley, is on
indefinite hunger strike. Today is the fourteenth day of her fast. She and the
others fasting with her are weakening quickly. They’re protesting because the
MP government is bulldozing schools, clear-felling forests, uprooting
hand-pumps, forcing people from their villages to make way for the Man dam. The
people have nowhere to go. And so, the hunger-strike.

What an act of
faith and hope! How brave it is to believe that in today’s world, reasoned,
closely argued, non-violent protest will register, will matter. But will it? To
governments that are comfortable with the notion of a wasted world, what’s a
wasted valley?

The threshold
of horror has been ratcheted up so high that nothing short of genocide or the
prospect of nuclear war merits mention. Peaceful resistance is treated with
contempt. Terrorism’s the real thing. The underlying principle of the War
Against Terror, the very notion that war is an acceptable solution to
terrorism, has ensured that terrorists in the subcontinent now have the power
to trigger a nuclear war. Displacement, dispossession, starvation, poverty,
disease — these are now just the funnies, the comic-strip items. Our Home
minister says that Amartya Sen has it all wrong — the key to India’s
development is not education and health but defense (and don’t forget the
kickbacks, O Best Beloved).

Perhaps what
he really meant was that war is the key to distracting the world’s attention
from fascism and genocide. To avoid dealing with any single issue of real
governance that urgently needs to be addressed.

For the
governments of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is not a problem, it’s their
perennial and spectacularly successful solution. Kashmir is the rabbit they
pull out of their hats every time they need a rabbit. Unfortunately, it’s a
radioactive rabbit now, and it’s careening out of control.

No doubt there
is Pakistan sponsored cross-border terrorism in Kashmir. But there’s other kids
of terror in the valley. There’s the inchoate nexus between jehadi militants,
ex-militants, foreign mercenaries, local mercenaries, underworld Mafiosi,
security forces, arms dealers and criminalized politicians and officials on
both sides of the border. There’s also rigged elections, daily humiliation,
“disappearances” and staged “encounters.”

And now the
cry has gone up in the heartland: India is a Hindu country. Muslims can be
murdered under the benign gaze of the state. Mass murderers will not be brought
to justice. Indeed, they will stand for elections. Is India to be a Hindu
nation in the heartland and a secular one around the edges?

Meanwhile the
International Coalition Against Terror makes war and preaches restraint. While
India and Pakistan bay for each other’s blood the Coalition is quietly laying
gas pipelines, selling us weapons and pushing through their business deals.
(Buy now pay later). Britain, for example, is busy arming both sides. Tony
Blair’s “peace” mission a few months ago was actually a business trip to
discuss a one billion pound deal (and don’t forget the kickbacks, O Best
Beloved) to sell Hawk fighter-bombers to India. Roughly, for the price of a
single Hawk bomber, the government could provide one and a half million people
with clean drinking water for life.

“Why isn’t
there a peace movement?” western journalists ask me ingenuously. How can there
be a peace movement when, for most people in India, peace means a daily battle:
for food, for water, for shelter, for dignity? War, on the other hand, is
something professional soldiers fight far away on the border. And nuclear war —
well that’s completely outside the realm of most people’s comprehension. No one
knows what a nuclear bomb is. No one cares to explain. As the Home minister
said, education is not a pressing priority. Part of me feels grateful that most
people here don’t have any notion of the horrors of nuclear war. Why should
they, on top of everything else they go through, have to suffer the terror of
anticipating a nuclear holocaust? And yet, it is this ignorance that makes
nuclear weapons so much more dangerous here. It is this ignorance, that makes
“deterrence” seem like a terrible joke.

The last
question every visiting journalist always asks me is: Are you writing another
book? That question mocks me. Another book? Right now? When it looks as though
all the music, the art, the architecture, the literature — the whole of human
civilization means nothing to the fiends who run the world — what kind of book
should I write?

It’s not just
the one million soldiers on the border who are living on hair-trigger alert.
It’s all of us. That’s what nuclear bombs do. Whether they’re used or not, they
violate everything that is humane. They alter the meaning of life itself.

Why do we tolerate them? Why do we tolerate these men who
use nuclear weapons to blackmail the entire human race?

Arundhati
Roy of India is the author of the acclaimed
novel The God of Small Things (Harper-Perennial, 1997). Her non-fiction books are The
Cost of Living (Modern Library, 1999) and Power Politics(South End, 2001). She is a leading
anti-war and anti-corporate globalization activist.